nable weakness; she was not
so sheep-blind as that. Something had been done outside any act of his
own to turn her face and her sympathies away.

Consumed in impatience to be up, anxiety for the delay, Mackenzie lay
the throbbing day through like a disabled engine spending its vain
power upon a broken shaft. Kind Rabbit came frequently to give him
drink, to bathe his forehead, to place a cool cloth over his burning
eyes. But Dad did not come again. How much better for his peace if the
garrulous old rascal had not come at all!

And then with the thought of Joan there came mingling the vexing
wonder of the train of violence that had attended him into the
sheeplands. He had come there to be a master over flocks, not
expecting to encounter any unfriendly force save the stern face of
nature. He had begun to muddle and meddle at the outset; he had
continued to muddle, if not meddle, to the very end.

For this would be the end. No sheepman would countenance a herder who
could not take care of his flock in summer weather on a bountiful
range. His day was done in that part of the country so far as his
plans of becoming a sharing herdsman went. Earl Reid, a thin, anemic
lad fresh from city life, had come in and made much more a figure of a
man.

So his fever boiled under the fuel of his humiliating thoughts. The
wagon was a bake-oven, but there was no sweat in him to cool his
parching skin. He begged Rabbit to let him go and lie under the wagon,
where the wind could blow over him, but she shook her head in denial
and pressed him down on the bunk. Then she gave him a drink that had
the bitterness of opium in it, and he threw down his worrying snarl of
thoughts, and slept.

CHAPTER XXIII

CONCERNING MARY

"Yes, I've heard tell of sheepmen workin' Swan's dodge on one another,
but I never took no stock in it, because I never believed even a
sheepman was fool enough to let anybody put a thing like that over on
him."

"A sheepman oughtn't to be," Mackenzie said, in the bitterness of
defeat.

"Swan knew you was an easy feller, and green to the ways of them
tricky sheepmen," said Dad. "You let him off in that first fight with
a little crack on the head when you'd ought to 'a' laid him out for
good, and you let Hector Hall go that time you took his guns away from
him. Folks in here never could understand that; they say it was like a
child playin' with a rattlesnake."

"It was," Mackenzie agreed.

"Swan thought he